[Privacy] Facebook Adds Privacy Shortcuts On All Pages– Overview

Facebook has become a part of the social life of most online citizens across the world and it has some pitfalls associated with it right from the beginning. Facebook team has been working hard continuously to plug in any holes or shortcomings in the design, interface and privacy settings to instill more confidence among the users and make it safer to use Facebook for more and more people without making them worried about their privacy and online security.

Today when I opened my Facebook account on my computer, I noticed a new menu shortcut along with a notification added to the Facebook homepage which I have not seen before. In fact they have added a shortcut to Facebook privacy settings which looks like a small lock icon next to the Home button on the top rights on all pages. On exploring it further, I found out that the privacy options have also been simplified. In this article, I share with you some tips on how you can easily review and monitor your privacy settings on Facebook using these new (not entirely new, but simplified) options.

Below is the screen which showed up when I logged in this morning. Let us talk about the options one by one.

Who can see my stuff?

This is the first options which controls the options related to the visibility (who can see the updates) of your posts, pictures, links or apps activity which you share. You can simply click on the options to change it. You can set it to Public or Friends, or Friends of Friends etc. as per your privacy needs. In my opinion, setting it to Friends is safe for most normal users.

Also you can review what all information is seen by others on your profile or timeline pages.

Who can contact me?

This is another important option if you want to have more privacy online. Say you don’t want strangers to send you Facebook friend request, you can make the setting to restrict the friend request to friends of friends only. Also, further you can set it to accept friend request only from the people who have your email id, this way it will filter our most strangers. You can also restrict who can send you messages.

How do I stop someone from bothering me?

If someone is riding on your nerves and bothering you too much by posting on your wall, creating messages for you or contact you from Facebook in any other way, you can now explicitly block that person by providing his/her email id or name without blocking everyone or all friends.

Also there are couple of more settings related to visibility of your profile to search engines like Google and Bing and lookup settings which controls the search results when people search other people on Facebook. You can also opt out of these search results as per your privacy needs.

Hope you find this brief overview useful, do share it with your friends and help them make their accounts more secure too. Check out some more Facebook tips by Trouble Fixers.